The Fatal Gate

by Ian Irvine

  Osseion slipped Shand’s marker in the open grimoire, closed it and handed it to Aviel. She put it in its case and carried it out. He folded the benches, carried them out and began to take down the tent. Aviel grabbed the last box, which was just inside the tent opening. Five minutes later they were in the air and racing for Zile.

  Later that day Aviel was listening to Nimil work his scrying board when he let out a small cry, then said, “I’ll tell her.”

  Aviel turned around in her seat. “Is there a message for me?”

  “Yes,” said Nimil, frowning at the instrument. “You are to present yourself to Tallia the instant you return.”

  “Did … did she say why?”

  “Grand Master Tule is dead.”

  Had her scent potion killed him? She felt sure it had. She slumped in her seat, feeling sick. She had killed an old man and Tallia might not see it as self-defence. To her the scent potion, which Aviel had made specifically to deal with Tule, might be evidence of a far worse crime—premediated murder.

  A guilt-ridden eternity later the battered, rattling sky ship settled on the sandy ground outside the gigantic front doors of the Great Library. Aviel, who had not slept since hearing Nimil’s message, looked out and let out an involuntary squeak.

  Tallia stood just twenty feet away, her arms folded across her breast. Malien was with her, plus the stout figure of Dedulus Janck, and Xarah. Aviel eyed them out the round window, her throat so tight that she could hardly breathe and a hot, churning sickness in the pit of her stomach.

  Had Tallia’s forensic mancers already identified traces of the scent potion Aviel had tossed in Tule’s face, overdosing him so badly that he had never recovered? Surely they would have. Once she gave Tallia the nivol they would hang her from the nearest gibbet. Aviel imagined her sad little body dangling there by the neck, her tongue protruding, the lumpy ankle she had always kept hidden exposed to the world’s cruel view.

  Osseion threw the door open and the ladder out. She did not move.

  “After you,” said Hublees. “You’re the one everyone wants to see.”

  Even Nimil was smiling, but Aviel took no comfort from her achievement. I killed Grand Master Tule, a sick old man, and now I’m going to pay.

  She got up and put on the little pack containing the diamond phial, her phials of scent potions and various other necessaries. Her knees were shaking. She was a fraud and a killer and she had helped a known traitor. As she put her right foot on the ground a sharp pain speared through her bad ankle and she gasped.

  Osseion sprang down beside her and gave her his arm. “Off you go,” he said, urging her forward. “They’re waiting.”

  She hobbled across. Janck studied her bruised face. “Clearly you have much to tell us.”

  “But first,” said Tallia, “the nivol.”

  Aviel opened the drawer of the leopardwood box and took out the diamond phial. Its myriad of faces winked in the bright sunlight.

  Tallia let out her breath in a long sigh. “The most expensive container in the history of Santhenar.”

  “A diamond worth fifty thousand gold tells, ruined to make a tiny bottle,” said Janck. “Hold it up.”

  Aviel did so, and the sunlight shone through the drop in the bottom, releasing a narrow, brilliantly green beam.

  “Ahhhh!” sighed Tallia. “But … are you sure that’s nivol?”

  “I can show you the method I used. Every transformation and colour change was exactly as the parchment said. Hublees saw it and so did Nimil.”

  “It looks as I would expect it to,” said Malien slowly. “But is one large drop of nivol enough?”

  “It should be,” said Tallia. “Assuming we can deliver it to precisely the right place on the summon stone. But it’d be better if we had more.” She peered into Aviel’s eyes. “I assume you can make more?”

  Aviel looked down at her boots. Every step of the method would trigger flashbacks about Earnis’s life and death, the horror of Rogues Render, and Lumillal. “We have more golden brimstones, more colophony and more Archeus,” she said. “The final step only takes a few hours, but …”

  “Nadiril has equipped a workshop for you upstairs. Lilis will show you there. How quickly can you make more?”

  “It takes a lot of work to make all the different kinds of layered filters. I’d say … five days.”

  Tallia looked at Malien, who conferred with Xarah. Xarah shook her head.

  “I don’t think we can wait five days,” said Malien.

  “We can’t even afford three days,” said Janck. “The attack force will have to fly out as soon—” He broke off. “Forgetting myself. Secrecy!” He nodded to Aviel, then drew Hublees away. “Got an urgent job for you. Tallia?”

  They walked away a dozen yards and Tallia conjured a green secrecy bubble around the three of them. Janck spoke for several minutes. Hublees did not look pleased, but finally he nodded and Tallia extinguished the bubble. Hublees picked up his pack, looking grim, and went back inside the sky ship.

  Tallia and Janck returned. “You look like death,” he said to Aviel.

  “I keep seeing the way Lumillal murdered Earnis. Over and over.”

  “Get some rest. There’s a banquet tonight and you’ll be on my table. Then, first thing in the morning, back to work.”

  “What about … Grand Master Tule?”

  “We’ll deal with that issue later,” Tallia said coldly and walked away.

  42

  HOW COULD I HAVE TRUSTED YOU?

  Aviel did not enjoy one moment of the banquet, and the honour of being on the head table next to Janck was a burden. Because her mission had been top secret, few people knew about her brilliant achievement, and she did not know how to make small talk. The eyes of the room were on her and she felt sure everyone was judging her, saying knowingly that she did not belong there, mocking her. As soon as she finished the first course she slipped away and went to the room she was sharing with Lilis, to bed.

  Aviel woke the moment Lilis came in and knew she would not get back to sleep. She lay still until she could tell, by Lilis’s steady breathing in the bed on the other side of the room, that she was asleep.

  Aviel lit a candle and was looking through the grimoire for a scent potion that could only be used for good purposes when she noticed the marker Osseion had inserted before closing it yesterday. It marked Shand’s scent potion, the Afflatus Effluvium, and as she glanced at it she remembered something curious.

  Shand had told her that his scent potion required nineteen different scents, smells and reeks, yet when he’d blended the potion there had been twenty phials lined up on the bench. Had he made a mistake? It seemed unlikely. Or added an extra scent to the recipe? Not even a master would make such a dangerous change without careful testing.

  He had lied! But why would he deceive her about a scent potion she had no interest in ever making? She moved the grimoire so her candle light fell on it. The method was hard to read, the pages stained as if someone had spilled dark tea or black beer on them, and here and there were unidentifiable crusts the colour of porridge. She scanned the list of ingredients. Nineteen.

  No, a twentieth ingredient was almost completely obscured by one of the crusted blobs. She poked at it with the tip of her knife and discovered that the crust was only stuck to the page on its right-hand side. Shand must have lifted it to read what was underneath then pressed it down again.

  And the twentieth ingredient was Archeus of Eidolon! She let out an involuntary cry.

  Lilis stirred. “Something the matter?” she said sleepily.

  “Just read something I didn’t like.”

  Lilis’s eyes fixed on her until Aviel felt the heat rising up her face. “That’s what happens when you pursue the dark side,” Lilis said jokingly, then closed her eyes.

  Aviel did not smile; it cut too close. She reopened the grimoire and read the last ingredient again. Archeus of Eidolon. And Shand’s twentieth phial of scented oil had been a similar yellow-green
colour.

  She shot up in bed. You unutterable bastard.

  Had Shand known from the beginning that he needed the Archeus to make his scent potion? She felt sure he had. He must have put the nivol method that used Archeus in with her other parchments because it was the only way to get some for himself. He had been so desperate to get it that he risked her life and everyone else’s. And Earnis had been killed for it.

  You betrayed us to the magiz, and now you’ve betrayed us again. How could I have trusted you?

  Her heart gave a leaden thud as an even worse thought struck her. What if Shand had made up that recipe for nivol? He’d had time to read the papers and parchments Tallia had given her, and he certainly had the alchemical knowledge to write a fake but convincing recipe, one that added the Archeus at the end.

  If Shand had invented the recipe she probably hadn’t made nivol at all. Had the past weeks, the staggering cost, the trials and torments and Earnis’s death, all been wasted?

  Aviel groaned. How could she tell? There was no way to test her nivol since she only had one drop of it. But she could not allow Janck to send people off on a doomed mission to destroy the summon stone with fake nivol. She had no choice but to own up to her treacherous collaboration with Shand, that she had kept his secret and allowed him to use her equipment, and that he had betrayed her too.

  And in wartime, when they faced such an overwhelming threat, her crime warranted a public, gruesome execution.

  She rose and dressed and, taking the grimoire with her, went up to the little cramped workshop. It contained a selection of equipment and chymicals brought from her workshop in Sith, plus the gear from the sky ship, still in its crates. She unpacked it and set it on the benches in the order she would need to use it in the morning.

  Tallia had put the drop of nivol in a much smaller diamond phial and given Aviel back the large yellow phial. She clamped it to a stand, pushed it to the back of the bench then lined up the thirty-six ingredients. It took five days of painstaking alchemy to make her layered filters and she was not looking forward to it.

  Something was missing. She studied the line of bottles and jars and boxes, then ticked the ingredients off on her list, last of all the box of golden brimstones and the jar containing several pounds of bubble bark pine colophony. She removed the lid and sniffed its cleansing scent.

  The sintered platinum! Strictly speaking it was not an ingredient, since it was unchanged by the process. Aviel rooted around in the boxes and found the heavy jar at the back, behind some empty flasks. She reached down to pick it up, but her hand froze just inches from it.

  The black cap, carved from ironwood, was half eaten away. But what could eat away ironwood? She shone a lantern on the jar. There were holes in the sides too, as if grubs had chewed through the thick glass, and half the platinum, one of the most resistant of all metals, was gone, leaving a grey sludge in the bottom of the jar.

  What could have happened to it? After making the drop of nivol she had picked out the sintered platinum with her tweezers and rinsed it before replacing it in the jar with the rest. There must have been a film of nivol inside the sintered metal and it had eaten the ironwood, platinum and glass away.

  Her pulse rose. She checked the little golden pair of tweezers. They were also eaten away; all that remained was the thick end where the two tweezers joined.

  Aviel had to sit down; she was shaking. Then it was true nivol—and if a tiny film on the tweezers and the platinum could do such damage, the large drop in the diamond phial surely must be enough to eat the heart out of the summon stone. She was saved! She would not have to confess after all.

  Now she felt guilty. How could she have so misjudged Shand? He was one of the great figures in the past few hundred years of the Histories, and always he had worked for the good of his friends and allies, and Santhenar. True, he had given her that nivol method to get the Archeus he needed, but the method had worked.

  Her weary eye wandered along the benches. Thirty-six ingredients; one to go. Aviel opened the small padded crate in which she had packed the lead crystal bottle of Archeus of Eidolon. The crate was empty. She went through all the other crates and boxes. The bottle was not in them either. She scanned the benches and the floor, then checked all the rags she had used to wrap her glassware. No bottle, no Archeus.

  She slumped onto a stool, an awful pain in the centre of her chest. She jumped up and went through everything again, then searched every bench, cupboard and drawer in the workshop, even places into which the lead crystal bottle could not possibly have fitted. It was not there.

  But it had to be there; she remembered packing it into that very box, the smallest of them, and leaving it inside the opening of the tent only minutes before they departed the campsite on the Plains of Folc. The boxes had travelled in the sky ship all the way to Zile, then had been unloaded under Osseion’s watch. He had escorted her precious gear up to the workshop and locked it afterwards, and a pair of guards stood watch outside day and night.

  Despair settled over her as she searched again and again. The bottle of Archeus was gone. Had it ever been here? Could a resourceful thief have gained entry to the workshop and stolen it?

  No! The bottle must have been taken from the box before it left the tent. She had left it there while she carried her gear across to the sky ship, and there had been ample time for Shand to take the bottle. She had been right the first time; he was a despicable traitor.

  And she was ruined. She had to confess at once, while there was a hope that he was still in Zile. Assuming he had not slipped away from the campsite on the Plains of Folc.

  She put the grimoire in its box and pushed it to the back of the bench, then crept out, her heart thudding dully, and locked the door behind her. Osseion was there, talking to the two guards.

  He took one look at her face and said, “Something bad’s happened?”

  She nodded.

  He jerked his head sideways, and she followed him around the corner. “What is it?” said Osseion.

  “The bottle of Archeus is gone. Stolen! Shand must have taken it.”

  Osseion asked no questions. “I’ll wake Commander Janck—he’s got to know right away.”

  “Janck?” she said in dismay. “I was going to tell Tallia.”

  “She left after the dinner with Malien and Nadiril, and they won’t be back until the morning. Besides, Janck is my commander now. This way.”

  Aviel was doomed. The three people who might, just possibly, have intervened on her behalf were gone. Santhenar was in desperate peril and her folly had made it worse. Janck would have to make an example of her. They did not need her any more. Now they knew that the method worked, they must be able to find someone who could follow it.

  Osseion strode off. Aviel limped after him, knowing there was nothing she could do to save herself. She could not run and she had nowhere to hide. All she could do was ease her conscience by confessing everything she had done, then taking her punishment.

  He had stopped and was studying her anxiously. “You all right?”

  “No,” she whispered.

  “It’s not your fault. You’ve always done your very best.”

  No, I haven’t. Osseion’s kindness was unbearable.

  “Well, the sooner it’s out in the open the sooner Commander Janck can deal with it.”

  And me.

  By the time they reached his quarters, after hobbling along endless corridors and up several long flights of stone steps, the bones in Aviel’s ankle were grating on one another. But the storm raging inside her was worse. She had done her best to balance her obligation to Shand and her war work, but she had failed.

  Two uniformed guards, one on either side of a broad pair of carved wooden doors, moved forward to block Osseion’s path.

  “Commander can’t be disturbed,” said the fellow on the left, officiously. He was as tall as Osseion and even wider, with a round, moon-like face, blank of expression.

  “Wake him!” Osseion said with
an authority that made the fellow step back, blinking at him.

  Aviel had no idea how one gained such authority, so simply and quietly.

  The guard glanced down at Aviel, pale and trembling and looking like death. “Is she the girl who—”

  “Yes,” said Osseion.

  The guard slipped inside and reappeared shortly to say, in an astonished voice, that Commander Janck would be pleased to see Osseion and Aviel at once. They went in through a wide, plain foyer, down a hall, crossed a long room with six tables in it, all covered in maps, nautical charts and stacks of papers, and then entered another large room with a small, cot-like bed, a table and four chairs, three armchairs and a pair of tall narrow small-paned windows that appeared not to have been washed since the founding of the Great Library three thousand years ago.

  Dedulus Janck was at the far end of the table, wearing a yellow and black dressing gown. His commander’s uniform hung from a coat stand. A pair of tall black boots stood beside the foot of the bed and a sword in a silver and black scabbard lay across the blue quilt.

  “A fine piece of work,” he said gruffly, “even if it did only result in one drop of the stuff.”

  Aviel did not reply. He had said the same thing at dinner, the only words he had spoken to her. He indicated the chairs.

  Aviel’s ankle was as painful as she had ever known it but she said, “I must stand, sir.”

  Janck picked up a round bottle and poured a tot of green spirit into a glass. He frowned at it, filled the glass and quaffed half of it, then sat down, staring at her. “Well?”

  Aviel gasped out the dreadful story. “Shand kept coming to my workshop, in Sith and on our journey, turned invisible. I … I owe him, and he demanded I let him use my equipment—”

  “Why?” grated Janck.